Dockworkers Ask: Are Your Union Pension Funds Safe?

Too many fat cats trying to steal workers’ pensions.

Jennifer Sargent, Northwest communications coordinator at the ILWU, sent us this from San Francisco.

In the current economic free fall, it’s wise to know where your pension funds are invested and whether they are as safe as you’d think. Union leaders of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) and other union leaders are warning unions about a scheme that cost 60,000 Dutch dockworkers more than $1.7 billion in pension funds that had nothing to do with a sinking economy—and everything to do with a corporate sleight-of-hand.

To highlight the issue, more than 100 international protesters from labor and community groups rallied Jan. 12 at San Francisco’s landmark Transamerica Pyramid building. Union leaders from the ILWU, Teamsters and the Dutch dockworkers’ union FNV slammed the alleged looting of more than 60,000 Dutch dockworkers’ pension benefits by Dutch insurance giant Aegon, the parent company of Transamerica. The big corporation recently launched a plan to collect a huge hunk of cash from U.S. taxpayers under the bailout program but suddenly dropped the scheme last month.

Said ILWU President Robert McEllrath:  

Americans are fed up with fat cats and corporations who are looting our country and destroying our economy. Corporate greed has put millions of people out of work, is destroying local communities, and pulling families apart. Corporations have to be more accountable to workers, and more accountable to the public. 

Niek Stam, national secretary of FNV, came from the Netherlands to address the crowd and pledged to expand the campaign to put a public spotlight on Aegon’s activities. Aegon acquired Optas, formerly the Harbour Pension Fund, in 2007 for $1.7 billion, and with it the pension assets secured for the sole benefit of some 60,000 Dutch dockworkers. Aegon now claims the assets as their own and maintains that the port workers and employers have no special claim to them.

Union leaders support efforts in Congress to draft legislation that will close the loopholes that Aegon hoped to exploit to obtain funds from TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program).

Because many Teamsters-affiliated pension and benefit funds have invested in Transamerica over several decades, Teamsters General Secretary-Treasurer C. Thomas Keegel has sent letters to the fund trustees alerting them to the business practices of Aegon and Transamerica. The ILWU also is reviewing its investments to see if any investments funds are investments with Aegon.

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